It’s that time of year again. The navel-gazing time. When you come back from the break thinking about what you want from the year ahead for your business. What will it mean for your marketing?
You’re either facing 2023 with renewed vigour and optimism or with trepidation. Nothing new there – it’s the cycle of life.
You’re probably thinking about financial year end and budgets, whether to reset how much you allocate to marketing for 2023-2024, and where to focus your energies to reach some goals.
Repeating the same strategies as last year for your marketing, communications and advertising might be exactly what your business needs. If it’s been working, well done! If it seems right, you’re doing great. But do you really feel as certain as you need to?
Assumption is the mother of all mistakes, they say. So, even if you feel like you’re on the right track, take some time to run a sense check, at very least, over your plans.
Whether you only spend a little on your marketing, or a lot, there are constantly changing factors around us that should make us pause and evaluate.
There are very few businesses who can ignore the impact of changing market conditions. For example, are supply or delivery issues putting your prices up, when customers are watching the pennies? If so, what is your marketing doing to keep you on their want-list? If conditions are constantly evolving, your marketing strategy should reflect the challenges, or at least be working to weather them.
Do you know what success looks like for your marketing activities? Reviewing your strategy, you can look at your measures of success of the previous year’s efforts and identify areas that you might need to tackle differently.
How detailed you are about those measures will vary across different businesses and scenarios but it’s sensible to have some kind of yardstick, however simple, to reassure yourself that what you’re doing is working.
Have you had more press coverage than previous years? More online engagement? Can you see tangible changes in sales, foot traffic or just general enquiries? Not every marketing and comms dollar can be directly attributed to a specific sale, but even the most basic measure that reassures you you’re on the right track is better than throwing money into the marketing abyss and not knowing if it is doing anything for you.
As scary as it sometimes seems, technology is always advancing rapidly, and new tools and platforms are constantly emerging. Adapting your marketing to embrace them may not be essential but, let’s be frank, it probably is unless you want to get left behind.
As always, knowing how your audience engages, or would engage with new forms of marketing is the most important consideration. But the attitude that you or your brand holds about being a leader or a follower is also a factor.
For example, will you be leaping into using influencers on Instagram, or diving into GoogleAdwords because everyone in your industry is doing it? Or would you be giving it a go because no-one else in your sphere is there yet and, if there are ways you can make it work with some smart thinking, you’re prepared to make the first jump?
Probably the most challenging for many of us is about re-evaluating the big-picture goals. Is your vision for the future of your business the same as it was last year? Whether it is lofty or conservative, having something to aim at makes sure we’re pointing our marketing in the right direction.
And I’m not just talking about the kind of things we talk about in terms of measures, I mean the single overarching objective – the ‘why’ as many call it. It’s harder to set tangible goals if there’s no clarity about the ultimate reason for being of your organisation.
So, even if you feel that your marketing strategies are on track, the start of a new year is always a good time to take a step back and review your plans.
It may take only a small change in direction to make sure you stay competitive, adapt to changes in the market and feel confident that your investment and approach really is what your brand needs to face the year ahead.
